Francesco Mazzotta - Cellular Activity

Under the astonished gaze of those present, the black man’s mouth opens slowly, while the head of the doctor sinks more toward his face, dragged by something that has taken hold on his skin.

The face of the unconscious passenger deforms, his mouth gets even more wide open, emitting a very distressing and prolonged lament, and fully embeds the head of the doctor, which sinks rapidly.

The flesh of the face of the unconscious man seems to flow, covering the doctor’s head with a pink mass of blood vessels and capillaries, which crawl quickly, penetrating the ears and piercing through his skin.

The lying man’s face deforms grotesquely, almost like it’s badly modeled with melted wax. His eyes move independently of each other, as those of chameleons. One of them points to Camila, with a look that has nothing human. She is sure that an obscure awareness is watching her right now.

The flight-attendant tries instinctively to take a step back, but one of the huge man’s hands snaps at her. His arm extends beyond the possible. An iron grip grabs an ankle, knocking her backward. The woman screams desperately and struggles, for the man’s grip is like a hot burning iron, and it begins to liquefy the flesh of her leg.

Passengers are frozen in terror on that creepy vision. They look with horror and disgust at the man’s yellow t-shirt unnaturally swelling and tearing.

For a moment, the figure of Bart Simpson on the man’s chest is deformed by the pressure inside.

Then, with a liquid sound, his abdomen explodes.

“Commander Green, Thompson here, what’s the situation?”

“One of the passengers suffered a sudden illness, the crew is providing first aid. Actually we’re about ten miles south of the coordinates that you have provided, we will begin descent loops shortly.”

“What kind of illness, Commander?”

The sound of electrostatic discharge echoes the words of Thompson, taking away the audio for a while. After a silence that seems to last forever, a chaotic set of sounds emerges from the communication system, drowning the voices of the commander and his co-pilot and reaching Thompson and his staff.

“Commander, do you copy?”

The noise grows louder. A mixed background of screams of terror and fear, the howl of indefinable animals and a sound that resembles the hiss of a rattlesnake.

“For God’s sake, Captain, can you hear me?”

After a long moment, the voice of the commander is back to bite. His tone has changed, what emerges from the speaker is the voice of a terrified man. He shouts to drown out the chaos.

“Something is happening in the passengers deck! They are screaming and we hear weird sounds. My God!”

“Green, Green, can you hear me? Keep talking, Green!”

The hideous sounds grows in intensity. The voice of the commander of the Boeing seems uttering incomprehensible phrases.

“Someth… hitting…inst the door tha… isolates the cockpit!”

“Green, what can you see?”, Thompson screams.

“It deforms! The bulkhead…… reaking! It’s com…… nside, it’s…”

“Green, for heaven’s sake, Green!”

For some terrible moments terrifying sounds come from the speaker, like unleashed hell. Screams, guttural sounds, hissing, barking of wild animals.

Janet’s voice is barely audible above the cacophony. “Sir, Captain Clark online.”

Thompson and the staff are almost hypnotized.

“Sir!”, Janet raises his voice, and only then the man recovers.

His expression is bewildered, swallowing before speaking. “Captain, what’s going on?”

“Sir, the Boeing tilted, it’s losing altitude. It seems out of control, it’s plummeting. We await instructions, sir.”

Some moments elapse in silence. They all look the screen with two green flashing dots heeling a red one. The latter slows down and deviates slightly from its route, while the other two are overtaking it.

“Sir, we await orders!”

During some endless second, the two green dots run through a slow loop to move back again behind the red .

“Campbell, is there a way to bypass the controls of the plane and fly it remotely?”

“I’m trying, sir”, replies another operator, intent on typing alphanumeric codes on a screen that looks like an old green DOS display.

“Sir, we await orders!”, Captain Clark urges again.

“As for now, there’s nothing you can do, Captain. Stick around and control the situation. You are our eyes now.”

“Roger.”

“Campbell, what about you?”

“The control system of the plane is closed and protected, sir. I can get through, but the signal is discontinuous and it takes time. However we have no guarantees that it’s fully controllable from the outside.”

“Gilmour, check if in that plane there are surveillance cameras that we can use. Janet activate the CdC Team, you have to wipe out all flight records and plane communications from Cape Town. I want absolute fog around that flight right after its takeoff.”

Meanwhile, time flows very slowly. The green flashing dots show the F14s performing slow loops around the red one that represents the Boeing, which now appears almost stationary.

“I’m inside!”, shouts Campbell. Time is running out, while the operator works at incredible speed and his screen shows an endless sequence of numeric codes. “The motors stalled, there is no thrust. The system indicates damage to the control structures in the cockpit.”

“Is there a way to turn the autopilot on?”, Thompson asks breathlessly.

“Negative, sir, the feedback I get from the system is inconsistent and constantly changing. It’s impossible to turn the autopilot on. The plane stopped responding to any control.”

A deathly silence falls in the room, to emphasize the situation’s inevitability.

After an interminable time, a set of three beeps marks the Boeing’s disappearance from the screen.

“Sir”, Captain Clark’s agitated voice, “Sir, the Boeing crashed. I repeat, it has crashed on the ground. The plane exploded on impact.”

Thompson swallows, although his mouth is fully dry. “Captain, leave the area immediately, return to the aircraft carrier asap.”

May God have mercy for the passengers and the crew…

“Janet, contact the CdC team again, tell Crowe I want full coverage of the media for the next 24 hours.”

“Sir, before the crash I got into the plane’s internal video surveillance system”, says Gilmour. “I captured a snapshot from the internal circuit cameras in the passenger compartment. It’s just a single image before we lost contact with the airplane.”

“Send it on the screen, Fred, thank you.”

The silence falls again in the room, while all eyes stare at the screen on which a picture captured by a surveillance camera comes slowly to life. The image is blurry and of poor quality, and at first no one can understand what they are looking at.

The compartment is a chaos. Some passengers huddled, as hiding, behind the seats. The interior walls stained with dark spots, some of the sections overhanging the corridors are opened, spilling the contents all over the area. A group of people is standing, pressed against the door leading to the area only accessible to staff. Their faces appear terrified. Their eyes, wide-open with fear, are all looking in the same direction. On the opposite side of the picture, where the patches on the wall are larger and where the faces of the passengers seem to look, there is something strange and grotesque. There is a man, although just remotely looking like a human being. In the photo his head is the only visible part, and it’s suspended high up, at the height of the overhead storage compartments. The head is abnormally elongated and appears highly asymmetric. The cranium is bald and shiny, showing a long and pointed ear. His mouth is open in such an impossible way that his chin seems to have reached the arm of one of the seats. His neck is also considerably longer than a normal human neck and winds like a snake for about half a meter, up to the side edge of the image. The rest of the body is not visible.